SIC VS GAN SiC vs GaN in 2026 and beyond

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Silicon carbide went into 1.17 million EV traction inverters in Q1 2026, or 17.2% of everything shipped, according to TrendForce, and Yole Group forecasts an $11 billion power SiC device market by 2031. Power GaN generated $355 million in 2024 and is heading toward roughly $3 billion by 2030 at a 42% CAGR, per Yole, with more than half of that 2030 market still in consumer chargers and mobile.

The two wide bandgap materials, long discussed as rivals, have settled into different sockets: SiC at 1,200V and above in traction, grid, and industrial power, GaN at 650V and below in chargers, server power supplies, and DC-DC conversion. The line between them sits somewhere around 650V to 900V today, and the technologies now sampling on both sides of it will decide where it sits in 2030.

Different sockets, different scales

SiC's lead is roughly an order of magnitude in revenue, and it's concentrated exactly where GaN can't yet go. Vehicles with 800V electrical architectures reached 920,000 units in Q1 2026, up 21% year on year per TrendForce, and every one of them runs SiC in the traction inverter; no automaker has announced GaN in a production traction inverter anywhere.

At the other end, GaN's beachheads are multiplying fast from a small base: Yole puts automotive GaN at a 73% CAGR through 2030, Changan's Qiyuan E07 began shipping the first commercial GaN-based onboard charger using Navitas devices at 6 kW/L, and Enphase moved GaN into volume solar with its IQ9 commercial microinverters in December 2025 and IQ9N residential units in June. Infineon expects the GaN power market to grow 58% this year to around $920 million. "Power GaN is transitioning from promise to production reality," Yole Group analyst Roy Dagher said in the firm's October 2025 report.

Yole measured upstream SiC substrate and epitaxy utilization at around 50% in 2025, with device lines at roughly 70%, and expects the overcapacity to persist until 2027 or 2028 before 200mm platforms and next-generation device architectures drive the next expansion. "SiC has entered a necessary correction phase," Yole principal analyst Taguhi Yeghoyan said in the December report. "After five years of massive investment, the market must absorb capacity before new tools and technologies can drive the next expansion." GaN carries no equivalent overhang, largely because its volumes never justified one: global SiC substrate revenue alone was $1.04 billion in 2024, roughly three times the entire GaN device market that year.

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Near 650V

Commercial lateral GaN HEMTs top out at around 650V ratings and roughly 60 A, while single SiC dies span 650V to 1,700V at similar or higher currents. The gap is wider than the datasheets suggest. Applying the industry-standard 80% voltage derating, Power Integrations notes that a conventional 650V to 750V GaN device can't sit directly on an 800V bus at all, and stacking 650V parts in multi-level topologies brings control complexity, voltage-imbalance risk, and added conduction losses.

SiC MOSFETs ship with avalanche ratings backed by 100% avalanche testing and typically withstand a short circuit for several microseconds, long enough for a gate driver to react; lateral GaN HEMTs carry no avalanche rating and generally no short-circuit rating, which is one reason industrial motor drives have stayed in SiC and silicon territory, along with the several-volt reverse-conduction drop e-mode GaN suffers during dead time.

GaN's compensation is speed: single-die bidirectional switches such as Infineon's CoolGaN BDS run to 1 MHz, several times beyond practical SiC switching frequencies, and that's what buys the magnetics shrinkage behind every GaN density claim from phone chargers to server power supplies.

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What could move the boundary?

The 800V DC data center is the first socket where both materials are competing in real volume. Nvidia's move to 800V DC power distribution for its Kyber rack generation pulled in Navitas, Infineon, TI, Innoscience, and onsemi as collaborators, with commercial rollouts expected around 2027, and Navitas has already shown an all-GaN 10 kW converter stepping 800V to 50V at 98.5% peak efficiency. Power Integrations answered the derating problem directly, detailing 1,250V and 1,700V PowiGaN cascode switches at the 2025 OCP Global Summit and claiming lower switching losses than 1,200V SiC at equivalent on-resistance, though that comparison remains a company claim rather than an independent result.

Vertical GaN attacks the ceiling at the device-structure level rather than the circuit level. onsemi began sampling 700V and 1,200V vertical GaN-on-GaN devices in October 2025 from its Syracuse, New York fab, explicitly targeting 800V DC-DC conversion and EV inverters, with claims of up to 50% lower energy loss and passives half the size. Renesas released a simulation model for a 1,200V GaN-on-sapphire device from its Transphorm acquisition, and imec has demonstrated 1,200V p-GaN HEMTs on 200mm CTE-matched QST substrates. All of these are samples or lab results, not qualified automotive parts, and none yet answers SiC's avalanche and short-circuit robustness at those voltages. A decade of reliability data separates a working 1,200V GaN transistor from a 1,200V GaN traction inverter.

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What entrenches SiC

SiC's defense is cost, and the 200mm transition is executing through the downturn. Infineon shipped its first products on 200mm SiC wafers in early 2025 from Villach, with Kulim ramping behind it. STMicroelectronics' €5 billion Catania campus starts production this year as Europe's first fully integrated SiC facility, and Wolfspeed continues 200mm production at Mohawk Valley after emerging from Chapter 11 with 70% of its debt cut.

Chinese substrate capacity has done the rest: 6-inch SiC substrate prices fell to around $400 during the 2024-2025 price war per trade reports, top-four supplier concentration is eroding, and cheaper wafers flow straight into device costs. Above 1,700V, SiC has the field to itself, with 2,300V and 3,300V modules shipping from Wolfspeed and Infineon for grid-scale applications and SiC superjunction devices queued as the post-2027 architecture generation, while trench SiC keeps iterating at 1,200V.

GaN's supply chain is meanwhile reorganizing mid-flight. TSMC will exit its GaN foundry business by July 2027, pushing Navitas to Powerchip and GlobalFoundries. Infineon is bringing up the industry's first 300mm GaN line in Dresden, TI has quadrupled internal GaN capacity, and Innoscience runs the world's largest GaN-on-Si fab at a targeted 20,000 200mm wafers a month while fighting Infineon and EPC in courtrooms on two continents. The transition has serious costs, with Navitas' sales falling from $83.3 million in 2024 to $45.9 million in 2025 as it walked back from mobile chargers toward data center and industrial power, with high-power markets crossing 50% of quarterly revenue for the first time in Q4.

At PCIM Expo 2026 in Nuremberg in June, which added a dedicated AI and data center stage across 650-plus exhibitors, the split ran along the same lines: SiC exhibitors pushed 1,200V high-temperature modules and double-sided cooling for EVs, while GaN suppliers showed devices scaling toward higher voltage classes and high-density computing.

The likeliest 2030 map is continued divergence with a blurred middle. Infineon's own 12 kW AI server power supply reference design mixes silicon, SiC, and GaN in one box, GaN handling the high-frequency stages and SiC the high-stress ones, at better than 99% PFC efficiency. Below 650V, GaN's density economics look increasingly hard to beat; above 1,200V, SiC's robustness and maturing 200mm cost curve do. The 800V tier in between belongs, for now, to whichever material qualifies first in each socket.

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